This One ERCOT Chart Explains Why Texas Is Having Electricity Shortages

By Robert Bryce | July 24, 2022

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2022/07/24/this_one_ercot_chart_explains_why_texas_is_having_electricity_shortages_843990.html

It’s been stupidly hot here in Texas lately and as you’ve likely heard, the state’s power grid is straining to meet record-high electricity demand.

Twice in mid-July, ERCOT, the state’s grid operator, was forced to ask the state’s consumers to reduce their power use. On the afternoon of July 13, the system had less than 3,000 megawatts of spare capacity as demand hit nearly 80,000 megawatts. That’s not nearly enough reserve capacity.

Since February 2021, when the Texas grid nearly collapsed during Winter Storm Uri, scads of reports and opinion pieces have been written to explain why the electric grid in America’s biggest energy-producing state is so shaky. But there’s no need for complex reports or in-depth analysis to understand why Texans don’t have enough juice.

Instead, Texas’ power woes can be understood by looking at a single chart published last week by ERCOT.

The chart shows that when power demand in Texas surges (the black line), wind generation (green line) often goes to Cancun with Ted Cruz. Indeed, when power demand zigs, wind production usually zags. That’s what happened during the middle of the day on July 13. As demand in the state was soaring, the output from the 35,391 megawatts of installed wind capacity on the ERCOT grid fell to less than 1,000 megawatts. That’s a capacity factor of less than 3%.

Of course, the wind-energy claque will attempt to dismiss the chart above with some hand waving and shoe shuffling that is usually accompanied by excuses that sound something like this: “yes, but we weren’t expecting wind energy to perform.”

Right. That “we didn’t expect wind to perform” excuse is akin to a sports-team owner paying a star athlete tens of millions of dollars per year (think LeBron James or Tom Brady) and yet saying after the star athlete failed to perform during a championship game, that no one expected to make a game-winning play.



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Quote: Isailedaway wrote in post #2

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The name Electric Reliability Council of Texas remains a huge joke.

It does not focus on reliability but upon diverse forms of energy which diametrically are opposed to reliability.

It is sickening what Abbott is doing to us

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yes to all of that!